Inventing Village Blocks

Okay, let's build a random generator.   This is going to be for laying out villages.  To help, we have this list of facilities to place.  My plan is to build a system that uses hexes, in the way I've described before, demonstrated here and also here.  Only, we'll try to do better than I did in 2018.

A "block hex" is 435 ft. in diameter, or 145 yards, or 132.588 metres.  In area, a block hex is 3.899 acres, or 0.006 sq.m., or 1.578 hectares.  Counting an extreme urban density for the medieval world is 40,000 persons per square mile, supposing a density of 10,000 per square mile puts 60 persons per block hex.  Therefore a village of 240 persons would have four "residence" blocks.  A village of 720 would have twelve.  This should be simple enough.

Note this village link on the wiki.  I worked on it today as a stub.  Be sure and read the details there; you'll need them for this post.

Okay, let's look again at those facilities available for villages, those in type-4 hexes:

From recent posts, and from the wiki, it's understood that a village not located on a river has 2 hammers and that one located on a river has 3 hammers.  Settlements may also be villages, depending on the size of the settlement, but settlements may also appear in any type of hex (though I haven't found one yet in a type-7 hex).  By my system, the only way a type-4 hex can have 4 hammers is if it includes a settlement.  There's no way for it to have 5 hammers (at least, not now; I may make a change in the future, but let's not think on that).

As per the wiki page, a village with 2 hammer is a "small village"; one with 3 hammers is a "large village."  The wiki explains the population generation for these.  A "settlement village" has a predetermined population, as the settlement link above explains.

Everybody in good and deep.  Excellent.

The next step is to make "block types."  For the record, I'm writing this post while solving the problem.

Residences.  The most obvious is a collection of houses, though finding a suitably archaic term is difficult — "neighbourhood" is 1620; "residential" is 1856.  Let's make two kinds of residential and call them "cottage blocks" (50 residents, 8 cottages) and "hovel blocks" (70 residents, 12 hovels).  Cottage blocks would be responsible for cottagecrafting that occurred.

Waterfront.  For this, we can gather together the boat dock, the quay and storehouses.  The quay is two or more boat docks, so we can toss that out ... unless we want to make a rural block with a boat dock in it.  Let's save that for later.  Let's option the public house to the waterfront, though this can only occur in settlement villages.  We can add the hostel also.  A hostel is a minimal wooden frame supporting a common room of bunk beds, a place for public washing, a hearth for cooking and warmth, plus and an exposed animal enclosure and a wooden shed for storage.  All this and an outhouse.  A small village is limited to one waterfront block, a large village can have two.  10 residents.

Yards.  This doesn't describe the space in front of a house, but a dumping site for materials, such as a log yard or a ship yard.  Believe it or not, the verb is "yarding" when describing the depositing of stores there.  We can start with the "farmer's yard," including garners and the granary, the grain mill, the shearing station, a windmill and a well.  We can scatter wells in several blocks.  Including two hovels plus living space in the mill, call it 20 residents.

We can make a second type of yard, the "material yard" that includes the sawpit, ox tethers, the carter post and again a well, the cloth mill and the wine press (or their local equivalents).  In a small village, run on wind power, in a large village, run on water power.  Likely a gong pit is tucked in somewhere, fifty or sixty yards at least from the well (and downstream, if applicable).  Again, 20 residents.

Village Centre.  Very easy: the bakery, the blockhouse, gallows, well and the gamewarden's house, clustered together with four cottages.  This ''village centre" has a compliment "market," which includes the area supporting the day market, the blacksmith, two wells and an inn, which only occurs with settlement villages.  The two would most likely be adjacent, but we might suppose they could be separated by one hex.  We'll get to placement of these blocks in time.  Packed a little tighter, 40 residents.  Limit of 1 per small village, 3 per large village.  There would only be one market block, with only 5 residents.

Temple Block.  Gravesites have been replaced by the cemetery, adjacent to the temple; the temple includes an adjoining cottage and well.  10 residents.

Manor Block.  This includes the manor, and with settlements two adjoining blocks of walled-in land.  The guardpost is located on the edge of the block.  One per village, regardless of size or type.  7 residents per 100 population.

Okay, altogether, we've identified the following blocks: cottage, hovel, waterfront, farmer's yard, material yard, village centre, market, temple and manor.  That's 9 types.

Let's add some more, not based on facilities.  If the village is adjacent to a river, it would have a ford, a bridge or a ferry, which would include a guardpost on the opposite side from the village.  Obviously, there's only one of these "crossing" blocks.

Because villages aren't "designed" so much as collectively joined together, we can break up the continuity of occupation by placing farms, primarily for market gardening and growing vegetables, though tilled land is an option.  If we want, we can distinguished "tilled" blocks and "garden" blocks.  To these, we can add "orchard" blocks.  We can also add a "village green" block that includes animal enclosures, a space used for meetings and mini-pasture lands.  Finally, we can include "natural" blocks, where the land hasn't been worked; this kind of place should have a high chance of including a pond, or some rocky feature that makes adaptation next to impossible, such as commonly occurs along the Mediterranean coast.  We could also think of places surrounding shrines or beautiful natural features, but let's leave these off our list for the present.

By my count, that's 15 block types.  As I see it, the next steps are to create a random table to generate blocks at different rates, then to make up rules about which must exist, and how random additional blocks are placed.  This, I believe, I'll leave for another post.